Fordham University - Maroon Yearbook (New York, NY)

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outstanding Jesuits like P. F. Dealy, and David Merrick, who were Presidents of the Colleges of Fordham and St. Francis Xavier respectively, lawyers like Judge Dodge of Ohio, merchants like Mr. Paid Thebaud of Yonkers and New York, Hocked to the new college. Rapid growth, divided responsibility and faulty administration nullified the advantages of a zealous faculty and student body. Father Villanis, the superior of the seminary, which was practically independent of the college proper, was replaced by a fellow Lazarist, Father Penco in 1832. With him were two other Italian Vincentians, Fathers Borna and Rainoldi. But since there were already thirty-one theological students by 1843, varying in their natural acquirements and previous preparation, the faculty had more than the ordinary difficulties. Additional teachers, particularly those with some command of English, could not be provided by the Italian Vincentians. Some students were discouraged and left. Misunderstandings which might easily have been explained grew into resentments. Charges that the seminary was teaching Ontol-ogism and Occasionalism, not as yet formally con demned, added to Bishop Hughes’ difficulties. The system employed in the college itself was not as satisfactory as it might have been. Modeled on the r curriculum and practice of Mt. St. Mary’s, courses were conducted by professors of special subjects instead of bv class teachers. Students wasted time adjusting schedules and changing classrooms, while the professors presided over five or six sessions ranging from elementary drills to advanced lectures in their respective subjects. The faculty was, moreover, too fluid for an educational institution. There were three presidents and one acting president, Father Manahan, during a five-year period. Priest teachers were often recalled suddenly to fill pastorates and to perform other ecclesiastical offices. The Bishop obviously had motives for making a change. 11 is experience with St. John's strengthened his conviction that Catholic education must be entrusted to a permanent personnel whose main work lay in the field of instruction. While he was abroad in 1839 he had invited the Religious of the Sacred Heart, the Christian Brothers and the French Jesuits to come to his diocese. He had always desired to entrust the work of higher education to the Jesuits, but, in view of the interest, of the Maryland fathers in Georgetown, he preferred to enlist a separate community of the order for work in New York. Precisely at the time when the allairs of St. John's were in a most awkward state, Bishop Hughes heard of the failure of St. Mary’s Kentucky. Father Boulanger, S.J., the official visitor of the French Missions, was in New York. The Bishop seized this opportunity. Letters were sent, arrangements made, and in a remarkably short time an agreement was reached. The contract put St. John's College and seminary in control of the Kentucky community. Fathers Thebaud and Murphy hastened from Kentucky in April 1846 to prepare lor the next year. At the commencement in June Bishop Hughes formally announced the inauguration of the Jesuit administration. In 1847 his pastoral letter extolled the Jesuit order as a teaching body and recommended St. John’s to his entire diocese. During the spring and early summer of 1846 the community in Kentucky packed books, scientific equipment, clothes, an accumulation of twelve years residence. Their real work, the most important Jesuit educational enterprise in North America, was before them. Father Kohlman's prophecy that the new metrop- New York Literary Institution. Latin School of the Jesuit Fathers, at Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street in i8o(j, on the site of the present Cathedral.

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there were over seventy-four boarding students alone attending the school then located on the present site of the Cathedral. So rapid was the growth of the New York Literary Institution that Father Kohlman prophesied a place for it among the foremost colleges in the country. The prominence of the school was due to Jesuit teachers like Father Fenwick, later Bishop of Boston, Father James Wallace, a celebrated mathematician who later won first place in an international competition, Messrs. William White, Adam Marshall, James Redmond, and three others. Fathers Macon and Winters and Mr. Paul Kohlman, who arrived in 812. As the school grew. Father Fenwick, who was in charge, required additional instructors. Since Father Kohlman insisted upon an exclusively Jesuit faculty and since there were then only fifty Jesuits in the United States, the Literary Institution could expand only at the expense of Georgetown. And Georgetown, which was founded in 1791 by Archbishop Carroll, was for various reasons regarded as the most important seat of Catholic education in America. Despite Father Kohlman’s insistent arguments that New York was the coining metropolis of America, that the Catholic population was and would continue to be much more numerous there than in the South, that New York was a more logical center for future Jesuit activity than Georgetown (which he felt should become a novitiate), both Archbishop Carroll and Father John Grassi, the superior of the Maryland mission, decided for the older school. The New York Literary Institution was closed in 1813 “to help build up what could be made safe and certain, the college at Georgetown.” The college building was loaned to the Trap-pists who used it as an orphanage from 1813 to 1815. The property itself was finally sold at a loss in February 1821. Father Kohlman and his associates returned to Maryland. The New York Literary Institution had failed because of its too rapid success. 9 Catholic New York was thus left without any institution of higher education. Bishop Dubois, the third ordinary, sent students to his old college of Mt. St. Mary’s, Maryland, but he was very anxious to set up a college in New York. In 1832 he had secured funds from the Pope to build a seminary at Nyack, but, before the two professors and five students could begin their work, the' building burned to the ground. Shortly afterwards he procured a tract in Brooklyn and transferred some of the stones from Nyack for building purposes. But this effort was abandoned when a dispute over the title to the property developed. In 1838 Bishop Hughes removed the burden from the shoulders of the ill and aging Dubois. Convinced that a seminary should be as far removed as possible from the distractions and temptations of city life, Bishop Hughes purchased a beautiful but inaccessible estate at Lafargeville, New York, and opened the combination college and seminary of St. Vincent de Paul in September 1838. The new college failed to attract more than eight students and the project was abandoned. Defeat merely stimulated Bishop Hughes to renewed effort. On a second visit to Europe in 1840 he tried to assemble a faculty. This attempt also failed. Upon his return, he applied to Mt. St. Mary’s and secured Fathers McCloskey, Harley and Conroy as professors. The Rose Hill estate at Fordham was purchased and all preliminary work was completed by the spring of 1841. The seminary was officially moved from Lafargeville to Fordham. On June 24, 1841, on the feast of St. John the Baptist, St. John's College, Fordham with the allied seminary under the patronage of St. Joseph was opened with 1 he Reverend John McCloskey, later Cardinal Archbishop of New York, as first President. 3 The new college and seminary prospered immediately. Within two years, more than fifty students were attending classes; new buildings were raised, new courses introduced. The faculty was, for its time, an excellent one. In addition to the scholarly Father McCloskey, there were such men as Reverend Ambrose Manahan, Reverend John Conroy, afterwards Bishop of Albany, Reverend John Harley, the second President, Reverend James Roosevelt Bayley, the third president and subsequently Archbishop of Baltimore, and others who became leaders of the Catholic Church in America. The student body was no less noteworthy. Men who were to become bishops like Sylvester Rose-crans, vicar-generals like William Keegan of Brooklyn,

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Robert Fulton's Clermont on the Hudson in 1807. olis would be the most effective center of Jesuit activity was destined to be fulfilled. 4 Many loose strands were woven together in the making of Fordham. Had it not been for the excellent work and reputation of the band of exiles at Kentucky, for the strange animosity of Bishop Chabrat, for the opportune presence of Father Boulanger, for the unfortunate failures of Nyack and Lafargeville, for the diocesan demands upon the secular professors at St. John’s, for the tremendous will of a pioneer bishop who refused to surrender his ideal of making Catholicism a respected force in America, St. John’s College and Fordham University might never have existed. By some marvelous and divine chemistry, the right men met at the right time under the right circumstances; there was a combination, analogous to the mighty combination of the American nation. Hughes the indomitable Irishman, Thebaud the prudent Breton, Murphy the precise scholar, Larkin the impressive Englishman, Maldonado the great Spanish theologian, men of many races united by Providence, hardened by adversity, were secretly and separately prepared for Cod’s service and then pushed forward into history. Fordham did not merely happen. It was part of the Divine Providence for the Church and her children in this new, wild, restless America. A number of the Jesuit community, laden with baggage, weary with travel, straggled up the main path from the New York and Harlem Fordham Station in August 1846. One might have recognized huge Mr. Gockeln, the scholastic, and tiny Father Legouais, the spiritual father; the ample Father Larkin with the brow of a Webster and the dignified walk of an Archduke; Mr. Schianski who had been a famous opera singer and Mr. Driscoll who had been a workman. It was truly an extraordinary community It was to become an amazing one in a few years with the addition of men like Fathers Jouin, Duranquet, Daubresse and others; former noblemen, doctors of law from Paris, of divinity from Salamanca, men who could rightfully aspire to chairs at great universities, come to do whatever was required of them. The celebrated Maldonado 23